NOVPUBThe barrow mounds were just as dank and dreary as he remembered them, and even though he reached them at almost noon, huffing and puffing as he topped a final rise, a hint of mist still clung to the small, artificial hills. He’d done some research on this place over the course of several lives, and depending on the part of the world, they were either called the Dark Hills or the Crypt of the Reaver King.
Not much was known about them beyond that they were a cursed place, and apparitions were sometimes spotted here at night. They were rumored to contain treasures, but it was said that the treasure hunters never returned. Simon was pretty sure he knew the reason why, given the fact that at least the one he’d been inside was crawling with undead.
Looking around now, though, none of the places could be breached anywhere that he could see. He couldn’t remember exactly which of the mounds was the one that he’d been in several times before, but he supposed it didn’t matter. “I should probably purge them all just to be sure,” he said with a sigh as he counted them. “Fourteen… fourteen words of earth just to break inside each of them. A year of my life gone, just like that.”
It wouldn’t take a year, of course. He doubted the entire expedition would take a week, but he’d still be using a lot of magic just to break each one of these open. Even so, it beat the hell out of going back to the closest village of any size, buying a mattock, and breaking in the old-fashioned way.
Simon promised himself he’d do three a day and finish the thing off in a week. Only, it wasn’t quite as simple as that. While some of them still had visible entrances that had been blocked by stone, most of them didn’t. Which meant on those he was drilling holes into the things that might or might not intersect with an internal passage. That was annoying, and every time, he wasted a spell by digging a hole that went nowhere. Further, even when he went inside the first two, he found no zombies, which puzzled him.
Simon had to use six words of earth to enter the first two barrow mounds, and even when he got in, he didn’t find much. There were a few grave goods and plenty of bodies. He searched those dusty corridors for traps, but when he found none, he took some of the golden Ornaments and he bashed in the skulls of the dead he found just to be sure. Still, it seemed pointless. He might be poor enough that grave robbing was useful, but it was hardly something he wanted to spend weeks doing.
Fortunately, he found what he was looking for on the third try and decided that would probably be enough. The mound of the Reaver King wasn’t the largest of the hills he was digging through, but it was the most central, and when he forced his way inside, he recognized the passage immediately.
He’d been in here several times, but only ever with the eyes of an adventurer and not a scholar. This time, he took some time to look at some of the nautically themed carvings that had been engraved in the large stones holding up the earthen ceiling. He could read words here and there, but they were too filthy to make out the whole thing.
Each inscription seemed to be bragging about different accomplishments. This city was sacked, and then that city was raided. Apparently, the man was a force to be reckoned with, and for a time, his boats ruled the coast from the north of Ionia to the southern part of Muran. That interested Simon and he would have stayed there longer to learn more if he hadn’t heard the shuffling, shifting noise of the undead up ahead.
That made him pull out his mace and whisper a word of light as he prowled forward. Until now, he hadn’t found any zombies, but that seemed about to change. In the corridor ahead, he found all the interred dead rising from their niches, but none of them seemed to be rising very quickly. Each was a dried-up arthritic thing, and despite their light armor he had no trouble putting them down as he advanced methodically, one blow at a time.
Even this was a letdown, and the only surprise came when he reached the central chamber and found himself standing over the central sarcophagus, just putting the Reaver King’s Crown on his own head.
“You!” Simon said, raising his shield in a guarded stance, even though his doppelgänger wasn't holding a weapon.
The other version of Simon looked just as he did the last time Simon had seen him at the foot of an erupting volcano. He was not much older than Simon was now, and he was in good shape. That told Simon plenty on some level, but there was nothing identifying that might offer him clues to the origin of this abomination.
“Me,” the other Simon agreed, with a growing smile. “I must say I didn’t expect to see you here, but I supposed I should have. We always do reach this point eventually.”
“What do you mean?” Simon asked warily, as the word to counter any spell the other him might seek to cast looped in his mind on repeat.
“I mean that we have done this dance before, and we will again,” the doppelgänger smiled. “More than that, I really can’t say.”
“Helades told me that time travel doesn’t exist,” Simon answered, torn between killing this pretender and dragging this conversation out as long as he could to get some answers.
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“She says a lot of things, whereas I must say as little as possible,” the other Simon explained. “We both have our roles to play. That’s all I’ll say.”
“If secrecy is so important, then why did you leave me those clues? The coins, the sketchbook…” Simon asked, almost as confused as he was annoyed.
“Everything I do or don’t is necessary,” his twin answered. “Just like you have to do certain things. Even if you never wanted to be Simon the Merciless.”
“Simon the…” he balked for a moment before he remembered. “The coin!”
“The coin,” the doppelgänger agreed. “You had all the evidence you needed of what was going to happen to you in that life, and it did you no good. How would answering any other questions help after that?”
“But that can’t be… I-I was never—” he stammered as he tried to square that circle.
“You were,” the other Simon smiled. “As soon as you broke the back of the eastern horde, Ara decided to pretend you never left. She minted coins in your name, spread stories of your vile deeds, and led everyone to believe you still haunted those mountains. It worked, too. The Murani never tried a second time and instead moved on to easier targets.”
“How was I supposed to know any of that?” Simon asked, turning as briefly as possible to smash the head of a zombie that was ever so slowly shuffling toward him.
“You shouldn’t have,” his evil twin explained. “You have your path; I have my tasks, and though our paths have to cross at moments like this, we should do our best not to interfere with each other too much.”
“Interfere?!” Simon demanded angrily. “You made a volcano erupt. How do you expect me not to stop that?”
“Oh, I’ll do far worse before all this is done,” the other Simon said. “So will you, but that’s not a conversation you’re ready to have.”
“I— What?” Simon asked, exasperated as he looked at his copy’s smiling expression. “Why? What’s the point of standing here if—”
Simon whirled at the sound of another noise, expecting another attack. It was just an echo from further down the hall. When he turned back to finish his question, the copy of himself was gone.
“Son of a bitch!” Simon yelled as he turned and ran as fast as he could back the way he came. When he reached the outside, he used a word of force to leap to the top of the mound in a single outrageous leap. Then, he whirled quickly around, looking for where his doppelgänger might have gone.
While he still had no idea how other-Simon’s teleportation magic worked, he knew enough about magic to be sure it was short range, and it took only a moment to spot the imposter running away from him through the thickening mist of the fen that covered most of the ground between here and the sea.
Since the conversation was done, Simon felt no need to pull any punches. He wouldn’t be able to question a corpse since he had yet to learn much of anything related to necromancy, but a dead doppelgänger was probably better than more answers.
Despite the fact that he’d already used a few words of power today, he cast a greater word of distant lightning and watched the flashing bolt that blazed down from the heavens as a slender line of ragged light. If the target had been close, that much power would have been as thick as a tree trunk. Even a little lightning would be enough to do the job, though.
At least, it should have. Instead, as it approached the man, it winked out of existence, never managing to quite strike the ground before it vanished amidst a peal of thunder.
Simon gawked for several seconds. He was tempted to try again, but instead he just said, “Son of a bitch.” He could still faintly see the silhouette of himself jogging deeper into the fog. Even as he realized that something was nullifying the magic, it was probably already too late. Belatedly, he realized he could probably bypass that anti-magic effect with an arrow propelled by force magic, before it reached the field, but that would have been a good thought to have a couple of moments earlier. Still, he drew his bow and an arrow and ran after his duplicate, seeking to catch up. Despite an exhausting twenty-minute jog, Simon only lost ground until he lost sight of him completely.
Simon returned to the barrow, frustrated, both with how little he’d gained from this encounter and how little of it made any sense. “Why do I want this crown so bad?” he asked as he approached the sarcophagus and saw the paper crown on the head of the pinned zombie. Why do I always come back to this spot? Most importantly, isn’t this all supposed to happen years from now?” 𝔫𝖔𝖛𝖕𝖚𝔟.𝖈𝖔𝔪
Simon was here years before the zombies happened, which raised a number of important questions. The first was that he always assumed that this open barrow was the cause of the zombie outbreak. Was that not the case? Was it only indirect or completely unconnected?
The second was perhaps more important. He'd come here almost as soon as Simon could make it here from his starting point. There was no way that was a coincidence.
“Is it really possible that my evil twin just left the door open, and then years later, someone else stumbled in here, and…” Simon started asking himself, but he quickly set that thought aside. “He didn’t open the door, though, I did…”
The realization clarified things quite a bit. This was the source of the zombies, he realized, but tomb robbers that would come in years and cause that outbreak were entirely unrelated to the theft of the crown. They had to be; it was the only thing that made any sort of sense, and he felt stupid that it took him that long to put it together. Evil Simon was clearly wandering around the world with his own agenda, but Simon supposed he couldn't blame everything on him just yet, even if Helades explanation of time travel had been bullshit.
She just doesn't want me using it, he told himself. Clearly, that was stupid, though, because he already had at some point in the future, and for some reason, he'd decided to use those powers for evil instead of good.
Simon sighed heavily. “Well, I guess that means I have to clear the rest of them out, too, just to make sure.”
